On December 4, 2018, a brief discussion occurred within OpenNIC about whether Namecoin should be removed. The cited reason for considering removing Namecoin was that some OpenNIC server operators had been harassed by blacklist providers and hosting providers due to some botnet activity that was accessing OpenNIC for C&C infrastructure. The alleged botnet C&C domains included some Namecoin domains, but also included some centralized OpenNIC domains, such as domains on .fur. OpenNIC criticized those blacklist providers for the harassment, saying “none of them have the courtesy to so much as send an email to to let you know that a problem was detected… they claim to be trying to protect the internet but don’t give victims a chance to fix the problems”. The discussion “[produced] little in the way of support or dissent” for whether to continue resolving Namecoin domains, and OpenNIC decided to continue resolving Namecoin.
- The smallest currency unit of Namecoin is called the swartz (similar to the satoshi in Bitcoin).
- Reading Sec. 4.3 of the study reveals that the study authors found an additional 111 .bit domains that pointed to a website that was also available via DNS.
- Updates are performed by creating a transaction with the name’s previous coin as input.
- The alleged botnet C&C domains included some Namecoin domains, but also included some centralized OpenNIC domains, such as domains on .fur.
Furthermore, since names do get sold or transferred on a regular basis, it would be difficult to prove that the name was not voluntarily transferred. While this doesn’t recover the name, it does reduce the incentive to attempt to steal names. On December 19, 2018, PRISM Break lead maintainer Yana Timoshenko floated the idea to Namecoin developer Jeremy Rand of de-listing OpenNIC due to security concerns about centralized Namecoin resolution. Jeremy concurred that centralized Namecoin resolution was a security risk, pointed to a case study he had previously written on the subject, and recommended that PRISM Break not list centralized Namecoin resolvers; Yana removed OpenNIC from PRISM Break.
What is Namecoin’s relationship to OpenNIC?
We believe that both systems serve a useful purpose, and determining whether direct usage of Onion Service names or Namecoin naming for Onion Services is more secure for a given user requires consideration of that user’s threat model. The existence of Namecoin as a merge-mined sidechain acts as a de facto increase of the Bitcoin block reward. This incentivizes mining Bitcoin at a higher difficulty than would otherwise be profitable. Namecoin and Bitcoin hashrate are thus in a mutualist relationship.
Names and values are attached to special coins with a value of 0.01 NMC. Updates are performed by creating a transaction with the name’s previous coin as input. As far as Namecoin’s consensus layer is concerned, names and their values are arbitrary binary blobs; any semantics assigned to those binary blobs (e.g. names being ASCII and values being JSON) are solely conventions used by higher-layer applications (e.g. ncdns).
How long does it take to mine 1 Namecoin?
Requires setting up a Namecoin client (Namecoin Core, ConsensusJ-Namecoin, or Electrum-NMC) and a recursive DNS resolver (e.g. Unbound) separately; additional setup is required for TLS certificate validation. It is substantially more likely that Namecoin will protect you from other countries’ intelligence agencies such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, as there is credible evidence that they have compromised public CA’s or intended to. Both Bitcoin and Namecoin also have second-order effects that oppose global heating. For example, Bitcoin decreases the influence of the Petrodollar (the Petrodollar is a major reason why the U.S. establishment opposes renewable energy sources), and Namecoin helps fight surveillance (climate activists are heavily targeted by government surveillance). Namecoin Core does not yet support anonymity; nor do Electrum-NMC versions prior to v4.0.6.
Mining Profit
The Tor Project’s Onion Services (which have a .onion top-level domain) use domains which are a public key hash. This means that their domain names are not human-meaningful, whereas Namecoin domain names are human-meaningful. Namecoin’s .bit domains can point to .onion domains, providing a human-meaningful naming layer on top of Tor Onion Services. For example, humans have trouble remembering a public key hash or recognizing a public key hash as the correct one; this is much better with meaningful names such as Namecoin names (or DNS names). Attackers can exploit this property of Onion Service names in order to trick users into visiting the incorrect website.
If your name is semi-expired, it will stop resolving for your users until you renew or update it, but you are still the sole owner of the name. Semi-expired names that are not renewed or updated for an additional 4,032 blocks (approximately 28 days) will expire. There are no registration fees for renewals or updates, but a transaction fee does apply. Our NMC mining calculator makes it simple and easy to quickly see Namecoin mining profitability based on hashrate, power consumption, and costs. Default inputs are preloaded with the latest Namecoin difficulty target and Namecoin mining hashrate for the best Namecoin miner. This claim is derived from a study out of Princeton University, and is a result of faulty study design.
In contrast, Namecoin does not have any 3rd party who can censor your ability to receive TLS certificates. ISRG executive director Josh Aas stated on January 4, 2019, that “This happens to maybe one domain per month”. Let’s Encrypt also routinely censors journalism websites for political purposes.
Windows
If name registration fees went to miners, it would enable an attack in which miners could register names at a discount compared to typical users. This would incentivize miners to sell discounted name registration services, which would enable miners to frontrun registrations that passed through such services, bypassing the frontrunning protections enabled by the separate pre-registration step. A full node such as Namecoin Core gives you maximum security by downloading the entire blockchain and validating that all transactions comply with the Namecoin consensus rules. However, if you don’t wish to download the entire blockchain, you can instead use a lightweight SPV node such as Electrum-NMC, which only downloads block headers (along with transactions that are relevant to you), which are much smaller than the entire blockchain.
Most users should install ncdns (see above) instead; it includes Namecoin Core. They require setting up a Namecoin client (Namecoin Core, ConsensusJ-Namecoin, or Electrum-NMC) and a recursive DNS resolver (e.g. Unbound) separately; additional setup is required for TLS certificate validation. An argument could plausibly be made that Namecoin enhances the UX of Tor onion services, and since Tor does protect from the NSA, Namecoin thereby protects from the NSA by decreasing the barrier to entry of using Tor. This is not necessarily wrong, but it is a very narrow claim and should not be given more weight than due. The above features can, of course, be combined arbitrarily for additional layered security. A merge-mined sidechain is a sidechain in which the data being validated from the parent chain is the parent chain’s proof of work.
Does Namecoin mandate usage of Bitcoin as a parent chain?
If you have the ZeroNet software installed, you can visit ZeroNet-enabled .bit domains. With this information and our backend hashrate calculator, you can calculate your NMC mining profits – providing valuable and strategic profitability information allowing you as the miner to make better informed decisions about Namecoin mining. Every aspect of our Namecoin mining calculator has been developed for miners by miners. At the moment, the current developers consider other issues to be somewhat higher priority. For example, getting a domain name without dealing with squatters doesn’t mean much if it’s difficult for people to view your website. Once development of other areas has progressed further, we do intend to spend a larger fraction of our time on improving name pricing.
The first concern is that too many potentially high-value domains, e.g. d/google, have been squatted for the purpose of resale. This is not a problem that can be solved in a decentralized system, because “squatting on d/google” is defined as “owning d/google while not being the real-world company named Google”, and determining that a given name is or is not owned by a given real-world entity requires some trusted party. Raising the price of names wouldn’t have any effect on this, because no matter what the cost of registering a name is, the resale value of d/google is likely to be higher.
Namecoins are a token-like currency used to register and update Namecoin names. If you want to register a Namecoin name, you’ll need to obtain some namecoins. Does any data on this page looks incorrect and you would like for us to check it? Our Linux-based mining OS is packed with advanced features and tools to help you optimize your mining performance. We are aware of third-party projects (who use Namecoin as a dependency but are not affiliated with us) who claim that their software uses Namecoin to “protect against NSA spying”; these projects are scams trying to part you from your money. On June 10, 2019, Yana replied, stating that removing centralized Namecoin resolution was of “critical” priority if OpenNIC was to be re-listed.
NMC Mining Calculator
Calculate your Namecoin mining profitability and estimated mining rewards by starting with the Namecoin mining hashrate calculator inputs above; mining hardware, mining costs, and mining reward. Find the most profitable ASIC miners based on profitability and hashrates. If you want to access .bit domain names, ncdns is most likely what you want to install. A majority of cannabiscoin Bitcoin’s hashpower is routed via the Bitcoin Relay Network, which has the ability to censor Bitcoin blocks that pass through it. This produces incentives for Bitcoin miners to self-censor any blocks that might violate any policy introduced in the future by Bitcoin Relay Network, because routing blocks through Bitcoin Relay Network reduces orphan rates for miners.
Users who require a DNS-like naming system that works without any software installation are likely to be better off simply using the DNS. The registration fee is 0.01 NMC, and the transaction fee is determined dynamically by miners (just like in Bitcoin). The registration fee might be made dynamic in the future, to improve economic incentives. If you want to mine Namecoins with your GPU, double click on the file “MineWithGPU.bat” from the folder “Mine Namecoins how to buy bitcoin fidelity with GPU”. If your hardware can handle it, and the miner I’ve included recognizes correctly the graphical card you’ve got on your computer, it will begin mining Namecoins for another test worker I’ve set up at the mining pool BTC Guild. Mining Namecoins with your GPU is far more efficient than doing it with your CPU, but still not good enough in a world where ASICs made specifically to mine Bitcoins contribute most of the mining power to the Bitcoin network.
On the other hand, Monero’s small size enables them to liberally experiment with more advanced features and cryptography, whereas Bitcoin-based systems like Namecoin are more conservative. The Namecoin and Monero development teams are cooperating on areas of common interest, as both projects agree that Namecoin and Monero both have a future. Private keys on Onename are encrypted with a password only the user has. So Onename doesn’t technically hold private keys, just encrypted blobs that are useless without the users’ passwords. Atlas nodes have a global view of the state meaning that they know if they’re missing any data items.
The website you are inquiring about appears to be a part of, or a state enterprise of, the People’s Republic of Donetsk, thus we cannot provide service according to U.S. law. In general, the Namecoin developers attempt to minimize our patchset against Bitcoin. If how to buy starl a feature makes sense to have in Bitcoin, we try to get it into Bitcoin and then merge it to Namecoin; Namecoin usually only introduces differences from Bitcoin in cases where the proposed change wouldn’t make sense for Bitcoin due to the differing use cases.